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Leadership: A Comparative Perspectivex*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

David Laitin  and
Ian Lustick
David Laitin
Affiliation:
David Laitin and Ian Lustick are in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. The authors wish to thank Professor Ernst Haas for his invaluable comments on several previous drafts of this article. They also want to note that since the article was submitted for publication in November 1972, political leaders and situations, especially those in the Middle East, may have changed since that time.
Ian Lustick
Affiliation:
David Laitin and Ian Lustick are in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. The authors wish to thank Professor Ernst Haas for his invaluable comments on several previous drafts of this article. They also want to note that since the article was submitted for publication in November 1972, political leaders and situations, especially those in the Middle East, may have changed since that time.
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Extract

In the field of political science in general and in the study of international organizations in particular, leadership has been a particularly neglected concept. It has served as a kind of residual category —a handy, or bothersome, exogenous variable. Attempts that have been made, in the international organization context, to isolate leadership as an independent variable and to proceed with comparative analysis have, at best, centered on whether a particular leader followed certain maxims or strictures for good leadership or on what battery of tactics a leader may more or less successfully employ in a given context. No attempt has been made, however, to set the parameters for the relevance of various leadership maxims or to separate the quality of leadership from the specific kinds of resources and constraints that prevail in any given task environment. Thus, general comparison of leaders remains conceptually impossible.

Type
Notes on Theory and Method
Information
International Organization , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , Winter 1974 , pp. 89 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1974

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References

1 See Ernst Haas's discussion, in chapter 4 of Beyond the Nation-State (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1964),Google Scholar of the kind of organizational ideology an organizational leader must develop if his organization is to grow.

2 See Cox, Robert, “The Executive Head: An Essay on Leadership in International Organization,” International Organization, 23, 2 (Spring, 1969), 205–30,CrossRefGoogle Scholar where Albert Thomas of the International Labor Organization is compared with Sir Eric Drummond of the League of Nations. The seminal work on leadership in America, Neustadt's, Richard E.Presidential Power (New York: John Wiley, 1960),Google Scholar fails, as does Cox's study, to give a clear statement of leadership as a variable.

3 Haas, Ernst, “The Study of Regional Integration: Reflections on the Joy and Anguish of Pretheorizing,” Regional Integration: Theory and Research, ed. Lindberg, Leon N. and Scheingold, Stuart A. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 39.Google Scholar

4 Deutsch, Karl, The Nerves of Government (New York: The Free Press, 1966), pp. 167–76.Google Scholar Although the concept is not spelled out as explicitly as our formurlation, it is embodied in Deutsch's discussion of creative, viable, and pathological learning.

5 We developed this model of learning and leadership skill in order to understand the differential impact of leadership of various sorts in different regional settings. We found that some psychological theories of learning, e.g., Insko, Chester, Theories of Attitude Cliange (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967),Google Scholar failed, for the most part, to establish meaningful connections between action and attitude, since the overwhelming concern was discussion of “belief,” “cognition,” “attitude,” and “value.” Though dissonance theory, see especially Abelson, Robert P. et al., Theories of Cognitive Consistency (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1968),Google Scholar does link attitude change to behavior change, its central concern remains in the psychic realm, and it has not yet been used to predict the way dissonance is likely to be resolved. Robert Axelrod's forthcoming article in the December 1973 issue of the American Political Science Review, “Schema Theory: An Information Processing Model of Perception and Cognition,” is the best example we know of the relevance of learning theory to politics. In no work, however, does the skill of actors (their ability to learn productively) serve as the focus for analysis.

6 It should be noted that the concepts of learning and skill development over time are not equivalent but are highly interrelated. Although we have discussed learning, we leave for future analysis a study of increasing or decreasing skill of an actor over time.

7 The Baathist-led regime of 1956–58 and the Kuzbari regime of 1961, which followed after the dissolution of the UAR, will serve, in this article, as paradigms for the more than 24 regimes that have surfaced and disappeared in Syria since independence. They are instructive examples because they followed one another and yet represented opposite extremes on the Syrian political pendulum.

8 Because we have not yet developed a set of empirically usable indicators, implemented policies, which we will later describe as adaptive, must be employed to prove that Assad has demonstrated high scope. The possible circularity of this mode of analysis is discussed in our conclusion.

9 In Who Governs? (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961),Google Scholar Robert Dahl saw the possibilities of an imaginative leader (p. 140 and elsewhere) and recognized the importance of a “political entrepreneur” (p. 6).

10 See Abelson, Robert P., “A Summary of Hypotheses on Modes of Resolution,” in Theories of Cognitive Consistency, p. 716.Google Scholar The literature on dissonance or consistency theory suggests a mode of interviewing, when interviews are possible, to indicate whether a leader has imaginative capacity. If the interviewer can present actual or possible dissonant situations that the interviewee has or may face, and if the interviewer asks what the leader may do—whether the leader will employ “denial,” “compartmentalization,” “transcendence,” etc.—this can help the student evaluate the leader's imaginative skill.

11 See Holsti, Kalevi J., International Politics: A Framework for Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 28–94, for an elaboration of our concept of subsystem.Google Scholar

12 Intrastructural analysis involves an examination of the way in which the specific pattern of power distribution among the members of a subsystem allows/ constrains the policies of particular actors within that subsystem.

13 Subsystemic transformation is defined as change in the quality of relations among the states of the subsystem, changes in the structure of the subsystem, and/or changes in the membership of the subsystem.

14 Here we are drawing on Schmitter's, Philippe C. “A Revised Theory of Regional Integration,” International Organization, 24, 4 (Autumn, 1970), 836–68,CrossRefGoogle Scholar especially the chart on p. 845. The assumptions made in this paragraph have been questioned by Scheingold, Stuart A., “Domestic and International Consequences of Regional Integration,” International Organization, 24, 4 (Autumn, 1970), 978–1002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 See Friedrich, Carl J., Trends of Federalism in Theory and Practice (New York: Praeger, 1968).Google Scholar